Soren Kierkegaard

and Trembling. Kierkegaard subsequentl yobscured the journal entr yabout
Regine with a great man yink curlicues, but with the help of a microscope
the trained eye can reconstruct the text he retracted: “In an aesthetic and
chivalrous sense I have loved her far more than she has loved me, for other-
wise she would neither have been haught ytoward me nor would she subse-
quentl yhave caused me anxiet ywith her shrieking. So I have begun a tale
entitled ‘Guilty-Not Guilty,’ which would of course contain things that
could amaze the world”—but that did not amaze Kierkegaard himself,
however, because he contained within himself “more poetr ythan all novels
put together.”
The leap from the shrieking to the writing—from pain over the loss of
Regine to the self-conscious proclamation of the start of a new work—was
made with peculiarl ycompensator ydirectness, but it is unclear how far the
expatriate actuall ygot with his “tale.” In an yevent, there is no surviving
manuscript, onl ya couple of fragments that he placed in his “black Berlin
folder” which was then laid in a “mahogan ybox” from which the pages first
emerged the following year, when Kierkegaard began working in earnest on
‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’ The one fragment consists of a romantic sigh over
having been born old and as a perpetual outsider, while the other describes,
with a sort of effervescent melancholia, a sixteen-year-old girl who owns
nothing at all, not even a chest of drawers or a cupboard, and who conse-
quentl yhas onl ythe use of the lowest drawer in her mother’s bureau, where
she keeps her confirmation dress and her hymnal: “Fortunate is the person
who has so few possessions that he can dwell in the drawer next to hers.”
There is an emphasis both on the pain of being an outsider and on the
hope of gaining some firm grounding in real life. These concerns point
directl ytoward the theme—and variations—on which Kierkegaard was
working in the manuscript ofFear and Trembling, a work that focuses to a
great extent on the conditions that would make it possible for a person to
regain an immediate relation to himself and to the world. Kierkegaard had
the best imaginable qualifications for describing this problemfrom within, but
we come to understand that he wanted to limit the use of autobiographical
materials as much as possible. Thus, in the retracted text he explained that
the relationship with Regine must not be “evaporated into poetry,” because
it possessed a “quite different sort of reality.” Regine was a definitive fate,
not merel ya poetic impulse. He believed that he had treated her generousl y
b ysparing her his pain, and thus “from a purel yaesthetic standpoint [he]
had acted with great humanity” which he believed was also attested to by
the fact that he had not spoken with an y young woman since the break